According to the CDC, the flu kills a surprising 3,300 to 49,000 people every year. This rather high number varies greatly in any given year, and according to many health experts is pretty exaggerated.
If you look at the U.S. vital statistics records for any given year, you'll find dozens of causes of death, along with the number of people who died from them. It's a huge table that stretches over many pages. In the flu section of this table you'll find three different listings:
• "influenza and pneumonia"
• "Influenza"
• and "pneumonia"
The first number is the flu and pneumonia grouped together; it's huge. The third is pneumonia alone. It's huge too. The second is influenza itself…and it's very small.
In 2001 the CDC reported that 62,034 died from influenza and pneumonia. That year, I would bet that CDC proclaimed that flu killed over 50,000 Americans. After a painful hour of searching the CDCs database, I found the true 2001 numbers: 257 died from influenza and 61,777 died from pneumonia.
The truth is, the CDC uses an algorithm to try to guess the number, and they group the deaths together into “influenza and pneumonia”
There are some 200 different viruses that cause "influenza-like" illnesses, and most of them aren't the flu. About 80% of these flu-like illnesses are caused by something other than influenza. Yet the CDC puts them all in the same category and uses them to boost their statistics. There's even been a shift in the language on their website toward the use of "influenza-like illness" instead of "influenza" or "flu."